Blog

From Blight to Bounty: Revitalizing Communities through Urban Farming

Posted by Angela Glover Blackwell0pc on October 31, 2012

All over the country, a new crop of urban farmers, along with activists and community organizations, are offering fresh solutions to low-income communities struggling with blight and abandonment and lack of access to healthy foods.

City Slicker Farms, based in West Oakland, California, grows vegetables in neighborhood backyards, and sells the produce at farm stands throughout the community, offering crops at a sliding scale: very low-income residents pick up produce for free. In Detroit, community members are using urban agriculture to help revitalize their city’s health outlook. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network works to empower African Americans by raising awareness about food: where it comes from, who controls it, and the role it plays in building healthy families and communities. The organization has established a four-acre organic farm within the city and organized a food co-op buying club. In Holyoke, Massachusetts, Nuestras Raíces is using urban farming to connect Puerto Rican youth with elders in their community while strengthening ties to their culture through food.

With the recent recession hitting hard, urban agriculture offers a multitude of benefits to low-income communities, including new opportunity in the form of sheltered employment and training programs. Urban farms such as Added Value, in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn, have provided job training for more than 175 neighborhood teens. Growing Home in Chicago has trained approximately 150 formerly incarcerated and homeless individuals on its farms since the program began in 2002.

Communities are also finding new hope in repurposing vacant land, creating beautiful, productive, and unifying spaces. Neighborhood Progress, a nonprofit in Cleveland, launched a citywide planning initiative to restore and maintain the health of the community by turning vacant land into urban farms. Cleveland, which has close to 20,000 vacant lots and spends approximately $1,000 to maintain each one, is embracing urban agriculture as a strategy to save money, beautify a community, and improve access to healthy food. The city is working with Neighborhood Progress to create pilot urban agriculture projects throughout the city.